


A Study in Futility

by TheZpart



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Be Careful What You Wish For, Character Study, Gen, Legato Conservatory, Mid-Story and Song, Sad, The Seven Birds are there but in the background, it's a little nihilistic but OH WELL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 20:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19911733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheZpart/pseuds/TheZpart
Summary: Serena has dreamed her whole life of having a work accepted by the Light of Creation.





	A Study in Futility

Serena wanted nothing more than to have one of her songs accepted by the Light of Creation. Ever since she was a little girl growing up in the outskirts of Legato and she heard the Light broadcast music into her mind, she wanted to do it too. She dreamed of her words, her melodies, her _heart_ being shared among every person on the planet.

At fourteen, she was accepted into the conservatory. That was kind of awkward. Most people, if they are accepted at all, are accepted when they’re ten or eleven. But Serena, even though she was denied admission, kept practicing. She kept writing music, and she kept applying. She suspected that she was only let into the conservatory because they felt bad for her. The teachers had seen her so many times, and seen her desperation grow, and finally they decided to give her a chance. Or maybe, she had earned it by working hard and getting better. It was impossible to tell--even if she asked, she might not get an honest answer.

Serena was a folk singer. She wrote story-songs mostly, ballads about doomed love, about dead musicians, about the stars. One professor called her melodramatic. Another wrinkled her nose and said her songs were “kind of twee.” But Serena kept writing. She went through every songwriting professor at the Conservatory and then a couple of the poetry professors. They kept giving up on her. She did not give up.

Serena was eighteen the first time she submitted a work to the Light. It was a love song. She was in love with someone who didn’t love her back, and that person was in the audience as she sang and played her guitar. There was a flash of light, and then the song was gone from her mind. A moment of breathless waiting passed, and then another moment, and then another. Her song did not return. It never would.

She tried again at twenty. This song was based on an old novel that she was too young to remember being projected into the world, but that she had heard told to her numerous times by her mother and her older sisters. She played it with a friend, a young man who was dynamite on the piano. Just as two years before, the light flashed, her song vanished, and did not reappear.

When she was twenty-two, Serena did not submit a song to the light. She brought in a poem instead, a sad little poem that she lay on the pedestal before the cave. She was alone--she’d snuck out of the conservatory in the middle of the night. It broke protocol, but if she were going to fail again, she didn’t want anyone to know. It was the right choice, she thought as she trudged back down the hill, her memory feeling around the missing poem like a lost tooth.

The year Serena turned twenty-four, the Conservatory was abuzz with the news of seven travelers from another world--another plane!--come to study with them. She saw the pointy-eared man spitting aphorisms under the tree; fought the tall, round guy for time in the best music rooms; tripped, once, over the shortest one; but mostly she didn’t pay them any mind. In one more year, if she didn’t have any works accepted by the Light, she would have to leave the Conservatory. Her parents would be delighted to have her back on the farm. The thought made her nauseous.

So Serena wrote. Song after song, dismissed, cried over, ripped to shreds and thrown in the corner of her dorm. It took her nearly a full year, but finally, she had a piece that she was proud of. It was sweet and slow, a ballad about forging on in the face of hopelessness, and it felt honest in a way her poems and songs hadn’t before. She got up before the Light and everyone and played it. A flash, a moment of anxiety and then - WHAM! Her song came pouring back to her, filling the minds of her classmates, all the professors who had dismissed her, her parents and sisters and _everyone!_

Her friends crowded around her, cheering, and she walked with them down the mountain. Not even the storm brewing overhead could dampen her spirits.

The next morning, she heard someone on the quad whistling her song and lifted her hand to greet him, but the sky came crashing down before she could speak. She watched him being crushed by a thick pillar of black shot through with strings of red and green and gold. She ran, but you can’t outrun The Hunger on foot. Within hours, her song, and everything else in her plane, was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr @the-z-part


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